How to Help Underperformers

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Excerpt #

On systemic performance, the accountability dial, feedback, and the underperformance checklist.

How to Help Underperformers 📉 #

On systemic performance, the accountability dial, feedback, and the underperformance checklist. #

One of the most frequent asks I receive from readers via email is about underperformers, and how to help them get back on track.

This request is two-sided:

• As a manager — you are bound to have some reports that don’t match your expectations. That’s where you pull your weight. There is nothing more rewarding than working with them to turn things around and see them blossom into awesome professionals.

• As an individual — you may feel like you are struggling sometimes. You may be stressed, disengaged, or don’t know exactly what is expected of you.

I want to help with this. So this article will cover:

1. 📈 Performance is systemic — an opinionated take on what performance is and where it comes from.

2. 📉 How to address underperformance — let’s talk about good feedback, the accountability dial, and how to catch bad things early and gradually.

3. 📋 Underperformance checklist — if you had enough of the theory, we wrap up with a list of practical questions you may ask yourself to figure out where the problem is.

4. 📚 Resources — as always, more articles and points of view to learn more.

Let’s dive in!

📈 Performance is systemic #

Once of the most frequent mistakes in dealing with underperformers is not to address issues early, when they are easier to solve.

You can’t call someone an underperformer until you have a definition of a “performer”

— Hasitha Pathiraja, Senior EM at Shopify

In many cases, this happens because it is not 100% clear what is expected of people, so, conversely, managers can’t easily point their finger at what is not working.

Good performance is about matching (or exceeding) expectations about some behavior or output. In situations where there is clarity about these and people are put in the condition to go after them, underperformance is rare.

In fact, I believe 80% of performance is systemic, rather than individual. There is a lot of talk around finding 10x engineers, but we should rather focus on building 10x teams.

Great teams make great engineers, while the opposite is not always true.

Great performance is enabled by several factors, that work like layers of a pyramid, each building on top of the previous one 👇

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The pyramid of performance. Each layer builds on top of the previous one.

1) Culture 🌟 #

Culture is a broad word. In this context, I refer to the principles and values that the company embodies.

These are typically a reflection of the founders’ personality, and mission. Expectations, how management is run, and devices like career frameworks, are all built on top of the specific culture that exists in a company.

Good behavior in a “hustle” company like Tesla will look dramatically different than in a “calm”, remote-first one like GitLab.

2) Systems 🔄 #

Culture is embodied by the processes and systems that exist in your team and help people perform at their best.

Examples include career frameworks, performance reviews, team organization, planning, but also technical stuff like CI/CD pipelines and other DX tooling.

Your systems are like software for running the company. They create consistency and enable people to achieve more, both managers and ICs.

3) Management 🎽 #

Systems are always imperfect and incomplete, so managers step in to fill the gaps.

As a manager, you have an outsized impact on individual performance through good feedback, guidance, and by creating opportunities for your reports. You should make your systems continuously better, automating and creating standards for parts of your work.

You should look at yourself + your systems as multipliers of the individuals’ effort, and focus on developing a 10x multiplier.

4) Individuals 🙋 #

Finally, there is no substitute for individual skills, traits, and effort. A 10x system multiplied by 0 is still a 0. But a 1 can become a 10.

You want to hire people who show personal traits that are compatible with your culture. Luca Sartoni, mentor and former Director of Engineering at Automattic, weighed in on this 👇

In 20 years of experience, I’ve never met anyone who could be marked as an “underperformer” if they excelled at these three traits:

1. Consistency — meeting deadlines, producing quality work, and following through on commitments. Consistency is essential because it helps ensure that ICs are predictable about their relationship with the standards set by the organization

2. Ownership — employees taking responsibility for their performance and results. It involves taking ownership of their work, setting goals, and taking the initiative to achieve them. It also involves taking responsibility for personal development and growth and actively seeking opportunities to improve one’s skills and knowledge.

3. Integrity — the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. It means doing the right thing in all circumstances, even when no one is watching. An IC with integrity is reliable, trustworthy, and committed to their work. They are also respectful of their colleagues and take responsibility for their actions.

You can hire for the specific traits, but keep in mind that these can also be developed through good example:

I try to deliberately develop them in my reports:

• To develop consistency, I show consistency: meetings always start on time. One-on-ones always happen. Performance reviews are compiled systematically on time. Also, expectations are negotiatiated and shared consistently.

• To develop ownership, I make myself accountable for every single bit of output from my team.

• To develop integrity, I show people how to stick to the team values, under any circumstance.

📉 How to address underperformance #

When some parts of this puzzle fail, you get underperformance.

As a manager, I have found that the best way to address it is early and gradually. You can do so by giving out an outsized amount of feedback. Really, there is no such a thing as too much feedback.

Through feedback you can do three things:

1. 👏 Reinforce: “keep doing this thing you are doing”

2. 👍 Acknowledge: “you did this differently and it works!”

3. 🩹 Correct: “this is not working, try this instead”

Many managers overly focus on the corrective bits, while the first two are equally important. People need to form a balanced opinion on how they are doing, and they can only do so if you comment on both the good and the bad parts.

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Also, the three types of feedback work in a sequence:

1. Bad behavior meets corrective feedback

2. Corrective feedback leads to a positive change that is greeted with acknowledgement

3. The persistence of positive change is met by reinforcement.

This is the happy path. The underperformance path, instead, is when your feedback does not lead to a positive change, which you should equally address gradually 👇

1) The Accountability Dial ⏲️ #

I am a fan of the accountability dial, by Jonathan Raymond, as a simple framework to correct bad behavior (kudos to Rado for showing it to me).

It is based on five steps:

1. 🟢 Mention — is the first check-in in which you mention the issue. You can address this from a place of curiosity, rather than judgment, by asking questions: “I saw you missed the meeting, is everything ok?” or “Your design doc doesn’t address X, were requirements clear?”.

2. 🟡 Invitation — is a more serious chat in which you address the issue directly. You investigate why it happens, make sure expectations are clear, and that your report knows/has everything they need to get back on track.

3. 🟠 Conversation — after two mentions already, you should have a dedicated conversation about it to express urgency. This is also where you can be more prescriptive about how to fix, and get a commitment in terms of timing.

4. 🔴 Boundary — after three mentions, it is time for a warning conversation that makes it clear there will be consequences if the behavior doesn’t change. If you think your report might not be able to move forward, sit down with them and show them how to do it (when relevant). Nobody wants to be micromanaged on a regular basis, but, every once in a while, microguidance is what people need.

5. 🟣 Limit — is the final ultimatum that makes it clear you should part ways if things don’t improve. This is a crucial conversation to have and should act as the final eye opener for them. Put it in another way: if you lay off someone because of underperformance, and they did not expect it, you did something wrong.

Parting ways isn’t the only way to reset the dial, here are more things you can try:

• 🎌 Move them to a different team — switching teams can reset their work environment and help them rebuild their impact and reputation with new people.

• 🧢 Move them to a different role — in some cases, changing roles is useful. E.g. some underperforming managers may benefit from getting back to an IC role, instead of being let go completely.

• 🏖️ Let them take time off — if you suspect they are stressed out or have personal problems, consider giving them some extended time off.

These ideas are, of course, situational and may or may not be relevant to your case.

2) Acknowledge improvements 📈 #

Hopefully, however, at some point on the dial, things do get better. When this happens, remember the pyramid of feedback and acknowledge it!

As a rule of thumb, the deeper you are into the dial, the stronger your acknowledgement should be when the behavior improves. At “The Conversation” level, or more, your praise should probably be public — in fact, at that point chances are others have started noticing things too, and a small celebration creates momentum and can restore some of your report’s reputation.

This works even with small things: let’s say you have an engineer who always shows up late to a meeting. You mention this a few times, but things do not get better. Other people are also pissed off by this, and understandably so. After a couple of times, you may assign your tardy report to creating the meeting’s agenda, beforehand. If this is successful, you can acknowledge it publicly in the meeting with a simple “Thank you Fred for the good agenda”.

📋 Underperformance Checklist #

Finally, whether one of your reports is underperforming, or you feel you are not pulling all of your weight yourself, here is a checklist with a few questions you may ask yourself to get a clue of where the problems are:

Culture #

• Are they aware of the company values?

• Are they aware of the company vision and purpose?

Systems #

• Do they know what is expected of their role?

• Are they assigned to a role/work that isn’t suited to their skills?

• Are they let down by tooling / DX?

Management #

• Are they getting clear and frequent feedback from their manager?

• Are they getting enough opportunity to prove themselves?

• Do they feel rewarded for the value they are delivering?

• Are they in a condition to take ownership of their work?

• Is the work challenging enough for them?

• Are they overworked and are now suffering burnout?

Individual #

• Are their personal traits compatible with your culture?

• Are they willing to improve?

• Are they dealing with personal issues?

• Did they just have a “bad sprint”?

And that’s it for today! If you are finding this newsletter valuable, consider doing any of these:

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I wish you a great week! ☀️

Sincerely,
Luca